I'll just do it myself

I've noticed this thing lately, which I hope I don't come across as me thinking I'm better or more important than others, but I did wanna discuss it mostly to bring it up as a thought. It has probably become a bigger thing now with the use of AI but I feel like it has always existed.

I also wanna preface this with saying that I don't really have anything against it to a point where if the idea is unique and sound and I believe they can pull it off. Hive is quite a different beast when it comes to embracing new projects/ideas/services/etc, both because you can incentivize the community with rewards to use it but also because if they see something valuable that makes the ecosystem better for them even without rewards, they will end up using it anyway. I have in fact supported a lot of different projects over time, not just with my attention and sharing/posting about them, but with my hive/value as well, for better or worse. I have however gotten to a point now where I can't really afford to throw value at just about anything just to be supportive and wanting them to do well with the way things have gotten at this point where I can barely afford to support my own projects. There may be people thinking that I'm "out to get them" or that I dislike potential competitors just because they may take some activity/potential/etc from my own projects, but honestly with the way I see hive growing eventually I'm pretty sure there's going to be room for everyone. Fighting between each other about such things is not something I'd like to spend time on, especially not if it's just because they may be doing things similar to what I've been doing. There is however a difference if they attempt to take the "easy way out" or take "shortcuts" where they go against community accepted activities in the form of how they use the reward pool, but that's probably a different thing.

The thing that drove me to write this is kind of different, and I'll be trying to make up some examples that come close to what I'm talking about without pointing at anyone in particular or trying to get people to try and figure out who I'm talking about, cause in fact I'm not really thinking about anyone in particular right now. Just something happened the other day that made me reflect on the issue in a grander scheme of things and it reminded me that I've seen a lot of it in the past while they may downplay the importance that reputation, history and activity may have for these things to succeed.

Okay, without getting more into this as if I'm about to give a talk to a judge, let's just stick with a couple examples.

A new project pops up, stating they wanna do this and that, may be a unique idea on Hive and something we don't have here. It may or may not ask for funding or to buy up their tokens to get involved, etc. Here's a question for you straight off the gate however.

Do you wanna try this project/invest in it if the team behind it has literally no history on chain and is on a brand new account not even mentioning who their main account is/how they found out about hive/etc?

It feels like many somehow ignore this step completely and dive right in, FOMO'ing over getting in early in some kind of pyramid-like sell order setup on hive-engine where they place 30% of tokens at 0.1 hive, 30% at 0.5 hive and the rest higher. It's like we've been involved in this space for a decade yet we wanna fall into tricks people have done through MLM schemes even before crypto existed.

It's one of the reasons I often try to ask more info about the people behind the thing and am usually baffled at how few care to even ask.

Now let's get into another example.

Let's say I'm building something and (before AI coding assistance) would need some help with a separate thing to add to the thing I'm building, so I ask some people if they have experience creating such a thing and if they'd wanna help build it because the thing I've created that needs this other thing is something that may benefit hive and their own stake as well. I.e. it's non-profit and it benefits everyone and I can't really offer you any money to create this but if you like the idea would you be interested in helping build the thing for my thing?

Here's where things get a bit weird. They're like "oh yeah i like your thing, let me build this it's not that hard, but it's my thing now and you can't have it". Which, in a way is fine, I suppose, but it was my idea initially so you'd think I'd get some say in how the thing gets built or how it works even if the dev who builds it gets to keep it and call it his. This is something that's happened btw.

So dev builds it, makes it work a certain way which I think kind of goes against the ethos or idea I initially had, doesn't listen to any advice on how they could improve it or make it better (even if it doesn't change the fundamental for-profit nature it now has or that it continues to be theirs), but they won't have it. They then decide to use the thing as a reason to get funding from the DHF to maintain and continue developing it, it doesn't go through and they end up shutting the thing down.

Now I'm back at square one where I don't have the thing that I needed and asked for and even if I ask if they'd wanna share it with me so I can make use of it they decide it's better to keep it shut down than to share it with me so now I have to re-create the exact same thing pretty much after having wasted half a year hoping his thing will pan out and help the ecosystem.

Okay, so there's probably a lot to digest there. It's a weird mix of, if I'm gonna create anything I'm going to need to get paid extra on top of it being for-profit for having created it. Doesn't matter if it helps my rather large stake and everyone else's, if I don't get paid extra then no one can have it even though I've already created it. Then there's also the mentality of just taking the idea or creating something that your project invoked the idea of and wanting to sit on it because they had the capability of creating it and wanted to maximize earnings from having done so.

I mean, most of this is water under the bridge now, I don't really care, but maybe it speaks a bit towards some of the things that we do wrong here where we are all getting paid by inflation from the same currency in the same ecosystem but we're unwilling to collaborate with others and thing of the big picture that if things do evenutally end up working really well for us we are going to do well financially too and people will remember that we worked together and built these things and not that we were a lone wolf who just happened to get lucky and brought hive higher because his thing became popular.

I'm sidetracking quite a bit here and this may probably become a longer post than I intiially anticipated, but hear me out a bit longer.

Now with AI everyone is pretty much able to create their own thing, some better than others, some with more experience than others in certain fields that may make their thing stand out more, etc. It feels however that everyone's just back to creating things for themselves for Hive and ignoring other things that may be important for your thing to succeed. This is kind of the thing I feel they may forget and the thing I pointed to earlier where I don't wanna "self-aggrandize" as our lovely little roach founder @ned used to say.

Your standing on Hive is still important if you want your thing to succeed.

Obviously not just your standing, the idea has to also be solid, the way it brings value to hive and why people wanna use it, how it utilizes the reward pool in a community accepted way and doesn't just offer bigger votes to use it over any existing idea, etc.

There seems to however be this thing where people think that their idea, even if it isn't that amazing, that it can stand on its own legs even if they themselves just got to hive, or just got back to being active on Hive or have barely shown any signs of caring about Hive in the past or the community, etc.

Again, I'm not pointing to anyone in particular, but I do hope we don't keep making the same mistakes over and over as we've done in the past. We may be at a greater risk of it now where most of the dev work can be done by machines so we don't really need to collaborate and put money down from many different wallets to see it through, which may have resulted to some team work in the past. Now it feels like some people can just create things themselves rather than help some existing projects build more things on top, refine the already existing things, etc.

This is what may lead to a situation where we're going to have more ecency-copies and copy-cat projects/games/services than we can count, maybe even more than active users rather than focusing on the already existing ideas and checking if there's something you can do to help out there with your AI assistance or other human-required workload such as testing/using/etc.

Now okay, some may think I'm thinking about this the wrong way, that I'm annoyed someone may be creating something similar to my things or that I'm not getting enough attention on the things I'm creating and am here ranting about it, there's always two sides to every shitpost I suppose. There is however a history on-chain, even if that history can also be read from different perspectives, I think most people here can still judge right from wrong, probably better than most outside of this space these days. So maybe my history will speak for itself and the fact that I'm still here building things and spending most of my time trying to bring this place to where I wish to see it not just for the people here but for the people who aren't here yet, because they deserve it.

Anyway, another sleepless night here so had to rant a little bit about something, let me know what you think if you understood any of it and if I came off as an ass or if you got the gist of what I meant.

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